Leaving X? Where Next? On Bluesky, Threads and the “Fediverse”

Elon Musk’s social media platform X lost more than 280,000 global users the day after the US presidential election. Meanwhile, sites like Threads from Meta and newcomer Bluesky have seen huge surges in signups. Kara talks to a team of social media experts about the “X-odus”; who is migrating to Threads and Bluesky and why; how those federated protocols (or “fediverse”) differ from X’s algorithmic platform; and if the social media “town square” giving way to a more fragmented communities is a good or bad thing. Guests: Nilay Patel, Editor-in-chief of The Verge and Host of Decoder; New York Times Tech Correspondent Mike Isaac; Wall Street Journal Tech Reporter Alexa Corse. Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram and TikTok @onwithkaraswisher Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:25Speaker 03

  Eli. Oh my God, dude. Wow. Look at this stash. What's going on?

• 1:31Speaker 01

  I know Louis has a stash like that.

• 1:32Speaker 03

  Really? Every time I get on a video thing, there's a mimic of someone laughing and saying, "What is on your face?" No, you should have done this years ago. There's no laughing here. This is, you have found yourself.

• 1:56Speaker 04

  Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. And you can find me on Instagram, Threads, Blue Sky, even on LinkedIn. But don't go looking for me on X. I'm out. I got on X in 2007, if you can believe it. I was one of the earliest people there. I wrote some of the earliest stories about the company as it shifted from a company called Odeo into what was Twitter. And I've known the company for a very long time through all its ups and downs, and it's had a lot of them. I loved the platform when I started using it because it was exciting, it was interesting, it was real time, it was news in real time. I thought it was best at breaking stories, finding people you didn't agree with necessarily, and meeting people, really. It was a really fun platform.

• 2:41Speaker 04

  I didn't like Facebook as much, and I really liked the quickness. It soon became very addictive. It started to sour for me, pretty much after Elon bought it. I have called it a Nazi porn bar. My final straw was all the anger and really nasty stuff that was being uploaded to me by blue checks. I had an early blue check. I was one of the early recommendations on Twitter. And it just was people who felt they could say anything to me, and they can't do it in real life, and so they shouldn't be able to do it to me on Twitter. It wasn't a question of disagreeing with me, it was really vile stuff. And it was bad for my health, and not just that, I just don't want to listen to these idiots. And so I got off of it. I'm not alone, by the way. People have been calling it the exodus.

• 3:23Speaker 04

  More than 280,000 people worldwide left X the day after the election. Many of them have switched to mainly posting on established platforms like Instagram, which is growing. Some have joined more nascent sites like Threads, and also Blue Sky, this new little contender, who has a very different point of view about moderation and friendliness and making it a nicer place to be, sort of like Twitter used to be before it all went south. And there's a lot of people who aren't sure where to go. There's other choices like LinkedIn and Mastodon and so many others. So today, we're going to go deep on what's happening at X, what kind of communities and cultures are emerging on these different social media sites, and how some are fundamentally different and what it could mean. For the role that social media plays going forward.

• 4:07Speaker 04

  We're also going to talk about the end of being monolithic. There may be a lot of different fractionalization of social media, something I have talked about for the past two years. And so I found really great guests to discuss this. They are Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge and host of the Decoder podcast, New York Times tech correspondent Mike Isaac, wonderful reporter, used to work for me, and the Wall Street Journal tech reporter Alexa Corse, who's done some really terrific reporting on what's happening in this very interesting space. It's getting very innovative and interesting now. Our question this week comes from former CNN anchor, now YouTube anchor, Don Lemon. He has left X for good. Don is also suing Elon Musk for refusing to pay him over $1 million after a content

• 4:49Speaker 04

  deal between the two imploded after Lemon's contentious interview with Musk earlier this year. So obviously, that's going to be interesting. So let's get to it.

• 5:06Speaker 04

  Alexa, Neelai, Mike, welcome. Thanks for being on On.

• 5:09Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 5:10Speaker 04

  Thanks. Yeah, Alexa just was subjected to our reminiscences because both Neelai and Mike and I worked together for many, many years. So I apologize in advance. I'm a new kid, but glad to be here. Glad you're here. So today, we're going to be talking about the exodus from X to social media platforms like Blue Sky and Threads. I stopped posting back in February. I feel great. It actually makes me feel better. I started to get really attacked, which had never happened before Elon took over. And it just wasn't useful. It was like constantly blocking people and sorting through drag. And I do that on other sites, but it got really bad. But let's start with taking a very non-representative poll of this group. Are you still on X? Why or why not?

• 5:54Speaker 04

  What other social media platforms are you on? And which is your go-to now and why? And maybe use them for different things. Let's start with you, Alexa.

• 6:04Speaker 05

  I am still on X and honestly, the main reason is it's the company I write about the most, so I need to pay attention to it. People who care about it are still there, who I want to talk to. I am more of a lurker on others, but like many people, I recently re-downloaded Blue Sky. Threads, I find, has been useful for following other tech journalists, although maybe Blue Sky is taking that place now.

• 6:33Speaker 04

  But you don't use those yourself personally?

• 6:35Speaker 05

  I don't post that much on them.

• 6:36Speaker 04

  Is there one that's your go-to, like LinkedIn? I don't know.

• 6:39Speaker 05

  Honestly, I mean, you guys laugh, but I feel like LinkedIn is like delivering the best value in a lot of ways for work. And like, I feel like they're encouraging reporters to post.

• 6:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. No, I'm joking about it. LinkedIn is quite a normal service. Neil?

• 6:56Speaker 06

  LinkedIn is funny because they're, they're running an old playbook. They're paying people to post videos on it.

• 7:01Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 7:02Speaker 06

  Which is a very Facebook video, 2014, 2016 playbook.

• 7:06Speaker 04

  Cheryl asked us to do that.

• 7:08Speaker 06

  Maybe a little destroys some media companies along the way. I mean, we all have to grow up. I quit X ages ago. I actually took a break from what I called algorithmic media. It was just, I could feel that it had changed me. And Elon buying X and taking it to what it became, it was just a good time for me to stop it. So I took a big break for a minute. I joined Threads, and I use Threads pretty heavily, but the Threads algorithm is just punishing. Yeah. What I want to use it for is news and real-time conversation, and it just doesn't want you to do that.

• 7:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, we'll get to that in a sec.

• 7:39Speaker 06

  Yeah. So like many people, I've moved all of that to Blue Sky in the past couple of weeks. That has been where I've spent most of my time. There's some absolutely post to both, and I'll start exploring those, but I think Blue Sky is the one that, at least for the news gathering function of what I do, is going to be more useful.

• 7:55Speaker 04

  Mike?

• 7:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm still on Twitter, or sorry, I can't even call it X now, it's just Twitter in my brain, basically, and like, I am, I do, but like, it is drastically worse for me as an experience. I think the blue, the verification program that he did really ruined it because a lot of the fun for me was in the replies and just like, seeing funny people or interesting people or insights, and now you can pay to game that, and you, you see just like, either bots or the dumbest people alive, like replying to things and not really getting the same sort of fun thing. So, I'm definitely on it less. There's probably a justification

• 8:37Speaker 03

  in my brain that I do it for my job, and, and, and, look, like, all of VC and tech, hardcore tech people are still kind of on there a lot, you know, like, the CEOs, the VCs kind of just talk to each other there, so that's how I justify it, but like, as far as like, the fun I once had, that's definitely not there.

• 8:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:55Speaker 03

  Threads is not really clicked for me. I think, similar to Neelai, it's like, the algorithmic stuff is not super great, but Blue Sky has been its own kind of interesting insular culture that I've had to navigate, and it is fun, though. I do think it's like, proto Twitter 2010 days of like, people kind of messing around, and I missed that whimsy, I say, I think. So like, I'm playing over there, and then like, Instagram also is basically something that I use, but I do think it's like, more personal stuff over there, and I don't know how worky I want to get it, and so, I'm not on LinkedIn, though. I mean, I'm not using it, maybe I should, I don't know.

• 9:34Speaker 04

  You're on it, though.

• 9:35Speaker 03

  I mean, I have it, but it's like, I'll talk to like, Dan Roth every so often, he's like, you need to like, use this stuff, and I'm like, I will, I just, it's not in my, yeah, it's not in my addiction cycle yet.

• 9:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm busy deleting all my tweets right now on X, for people to know. It's very hard to do, we can talk about it in a little bit, and then I will go off of it completely.

• 9:55Speaker 03

  Are you gonna leave your account?

• 9:56Speaker 04

  I am. I'm gonna let him take it over. I know, I get it, but that, that last Terms of Service thing just got me, and we'll talk about that in a second. I am, I'm And I'll be excited to see who Kara Swisher is. Probably will eat on Twitter.

• 10:10Speaker 06

  This is, this is my big worry. So I've got reckless, which is they want it and I don't want them to have it. Oh, really?

• 10:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, there have been lots of attempts to buy that from me over the years. And then I have the verge accounts to manage. And I think it's actually pretty dangerous for someone to get to impersonate our publication. So we're gonna keep posting.

• 10:29Speaker 04

  I don't care.

• 10:30Speaker 06

  But this is like, I'm in it, right? Either answer, I think, is appropriate.

• 10:34Speaker 04

  I use, I like threads. Threads, I have to say, is good for referrals as a marketing device compared to Blue Sky. The only thing, over at X now, I get sort of cursed at by right wing trolls. And over on both threads and, and Blue Sky, also, I get chastised by left wing people. Like a lot, like, why did you post this? What is this? Or they don't have any context of what I'm saying or the history of anything I've done. And so it's, it's a lot of lectures, which is irritating. Anyway, I want to talk about the news sites in a minute, but let's first talk about X and the experience. Donald Trump's win clearly was a trigger for many users to leave the platform. But Alexa, your team at the Journal did an experiment to show how X users are being fed political content,

• 11:19Speaker 04

  whether they liked it or not. And this is not a surprise, because everything, at this point, every accusation he makes is a confession, as far as I'm concerned. You also reported on how he was manipulating the algorithms so people could see his tweets. This is something that's also early reported. Talk about how much of a role that's played, because, you know, he had talked about Twitter being used in the Twitter files as being manipulated, but it wasn't compared to what they're doing now.

• 11:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I think anyone using the platform kind of like had this impression, like, whoa, like, what I'm seeing on my 4U feed feels really different than two years ago. But we like wanted to do our best to like measure it. And yeah, what we, we set up these test accounts that

• 12:03Speaker 05

  Did not like show any interest in politics and they just got blanketed with political posts and a lot of that content was right leaning. You know, how much of a difference it makes in terms of like the election, I don't know, but clearly people are not happy or a lot of people are not happy with like what they're seeing on the site and that's why they're looking for like threads in blue sky. I mean, conservative users are happy.

• 12:28Speaker 04

  So the thumb is on the scale. Obviously Elon did it to himself long before that. He wanted people to look at him, look at me, mommy. And he should, he paid a lot of money for it. And so if he wants people to look at him, it's fine by me. It's grotesque and strange and insecure, but it's a lot of looking at him, but then he shifted it over to the right, correct?

• 12:47Speaker 05

  So, you know, we couldn't tell exactly why this was happening. Obviously, I would love to know, but you're totally right. There has been previous reporting. I've reported on that about how Elon put the thumb on the scale for his own tweets. So that obviously raises questions about what's happening behind the scenes.

• 13:07Speaker 04

  Right, which we know about a little bit. Now, there are other reasons this was starting to happen before the election. For example, Musk changing terms of service. Neil, I talk about what's going on there. I mean, terms of service is something we all sign away our lives, but in this case, it's particularly pernicious.

• 13:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, he wants to use all the data on X for training Grok. So I think-

• 13:28Speaker 04

  Which is his AI service.

• 13:29Speaker 06

  Every company is going through this moment where they're kind of leading their users to make sure that they have the rights to do the appropriate training. And then Musk in particular took that opportunity to move disputes to Texas where he's going to get a favorable judge, a favorable court. There's a lot of consternation in the legal world about the judges in Texas right now. If you are paying attention to that side of the house, which no one should, there was just a kerfuffle at the Federalist Society conference where a Texas judge like yelled at a legal professor about criticizing forum shopping in Texas. It's a whole thing. It's very tiresome, but I think what you're getting is here's a service, it's going to be completely insulated.

• 14:13Speaker 03

  From any pressure that users might place on it, which is already very low, right? The amount of pressure you as a user or citizen of the internet can put on a platform owner is already basically zero, but he's going to insulate it further. He's going to have a very favorable sort of legal environment, right? Brendan Carr at the FCC wants to rein in big tech. He's definitely not going to rein in Elon, who he wants to distribute Starlink. So he has this favorable legal environment and then he's making it more favorable with his terms of service changes, which will then also feed into Grok. And that is just a big mix of things that most people are going to hit, I agree on and not paying any attention to, but it is actually all, it all just ladders into a pretty pernicious set of results.

• 14:51Speaker 04

  Right, right. They usually do things for their advantage, but not quite this personal advantage. Now, I decided to download my entire archive of posts and it was, I don't know, 170,000 tweets and replies and it's, it's still going on. It's still taking forever because of the services. Now, one specific change to the term of services, Neil, I says is, as of November 15th last week, all lawsuits against X must be filed in the district, if you're, if you're using the service, must be filed in the district court in the Northern District of Texas. Before someone jumps up and says, but Elon moved the headquarters to Texas and that's why, please sit down. X is headquartered in Bastrop, 30 miles east of Austin, which is the Western District. Mike, you're from Fort Worth, which is the Northern District.

• 15:33Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 15:34Speaker 04

  Explain what he's done here and, and what does that precisely mean for users?

• 15:39Speaker 03

  I mean, I think, well, it's funny. I know, Alexa, you may know more about this than I, but I just, I think a lot of his trickery around where the company's headquartered, where he wants to move, has been a mix of personal as well as like professional sort of jujitsu, you know? There's the, his sort of reactions to California politics and sort of transgender issues here have really set him off and like immediately sort of he decided to like pick up and move to Texas. But also I think that's mixed with, you know,

• 16:12Speaker 04

  Tax.

• 16:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, tax, the tax burdens that he has, the, the, to what Neil I was saying, just sort of like the idea that where am I going to get the best judges? Where am I going to get? To bring people to maybe arbitration, if that's where he can sort of move lawsuits. And Tex, just like, as far as I can tell at this point, really loves Musk in a way that California doesn't seem to as much, or at least he has like a mixed sort of bag in California courts. And look, I will say to be fair, like, if you go to look at Facebook or OpenAI or Google, like on docs, they are asking people to let them use your data to train their stuff too, right?

• 16:55Speaker 03

  So like, that's the sort of macro environment that we're in, but I think you guys are right in that X is going a bit further with, you have very little recourse, and if you want to bring any sort of challenge to us, we're going to do that in a way that stacks the deck for us.

• 17:09Speaker 05

  Right.

• 17:10Speaker 06

  If you're Sarah Silverman, or the New York Times, or whoever, and you want to sue X for copyright infringement over training data, you're going to end up in Texas.

• 17:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:18Speaker 06

  And that's just a big deal, right? Because those suits are ongoing, they're all over the country. And where you're going to engineer is like a circuit split, right? You're going to get a court in Texas saying Elon Musk can do whatever he wants, and a court in California saying Hollywood has a point here, and that's going to land in the Supreme Court very quickly.

• 17:33Speaker 05

  Alexa, talk about what this means for people. You know, we actually asked X about this, my colleague and I, and they said like, oh, you can still opt out. I mean, I think like they're rolling out the Terms of Service now, so like kind of we'll see how that works in practice. Every company wants like data to train these days. Um, I thought it was really interesting that Blue Sky said it will never use people's data to train AI. And it's just one of the ways they're trying to distinguish themselves.

• 18:05Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 18:06Speaker 03

  Oh, wait. Yeah, what, what, what do you think?

• 18:08Speaker 06

  Well, so this is fascinating, right? Because Blue Sky is distributed, it's decentralized. You can just read the entire fire hose via API. So Blue Sky is a corporate entity, is 20 people, it doesn't make any money. So, right now, they have no incentives to do that. But every AI company is saying, well, the open web is free game.

• 18:28Speaker 04

  Hmm, interesting.

• 18:30Speaker 06

  Right? Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of AI at Microsoft, is on the record saying, well, if it's on the web, yeah, that's the deal. And so there's, you can, the Blue Sky folks can say that, and maybe Blue Sky itself

• 18:42Speaker 03

  Right.

• 18:42Speaker 06

  will never do the training, but it is sort of like the architecture of that system allows other people to do it. And that, there's no reason that another Blue Sky-associated thing couldn't do it. And I think we just have to pay attention to that over time.

• 18:56Speaker 04

  Exactly. So, let's talk about those two social media sites that are in the biggest pickup since the election, Threads and Blue Sky. Let's compare the numbers quickly. Blue Sky is just up 20 million users this week. It keeps going up, everyone's all excited on the site. But those are not active users. Meanwhile, Threads has 15 million signups in November alone, even before the election. Threads had 275 million active monthly users. Now, they've been, Adam Mosseri, who runs it, has been beefing about what, because everyone's like, Blue Sky's better and more used on a daily basis. Mike, people have called this David and Goliath. Talk about this, I think it's a little more complex than that.

• 19:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. I think, I think, look, there's momentum around Blue Sky that's like, adding, like, look, adding a million people a day is no slouch, and I think that that's like, worthy of celebrating if you want to celebrate that. But I do think the scale of Facebook and Threads and everything that's sort of incorporated there has to be sort of appreciated. Facebook also has a ton more levers that they can do to juice growth. Like, it's, Blue Sky's basically organic growth of like going and downloading the app or signing up on the web. With Threads, it's, the little hooks are inside of Instagram or in Facebook, and like, they can just sort of nudge you either to sign up or to come back.

• 20:17Speaker 03

  And Facebook has always had a real advantage there, just in leveraging their existing properties to do the next thing, you know?

• 20:24Speaker 04

  Right, which Microsoft got in trouble for.

• 20:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, right, no, exactly. It's just like very much a big company playbook there. I think the issue for both of these companies is like what online culture looks like for them, you know, and like what platforms kind of are defined by over time. And they have different approaches to that, each of them. Blue Sky seems to be like leaning into you can customize all this yourself and you can like have control of the experience. And I'm always curious how much the average person wants that.

• 20:56Speaker 04

  Does that.

• 20:57Speaker 03

  You know, yeah, like sort of like someone modding their Android phone or something versus like someone getting an Apple phone and just saying, I want it to all kind of work for me and not have to dig into the weeds a lot.

• 21:07Speaker 04

  So Alexa, roughly speaking, who you see migrating to these platforms? It's celebrities, influencers, liberals, journalists, creatives. How are you seeing it? And are they just window shopping and we'll see those numbers dropping again?

• 21:19Speaker 05

  We have seen celebrities. I mean, yeah, just anecdotally, you know, the number of people who actually quit X is smaller than the number of people who are opening accounts on these other platforms. And so you always got to wonder when someone says they're leaving X, like, are they actually leaving? Journalists is a really interesting community because we saw a lot of tech journalists on threads, but there's been a lot of questions about how does Meta is moderating news content? And so maybe like, is Blue Sky going to be the hot place for that now?

• 21:53Speaker 04

  And what about others, influencers? You know, there was Black Twitter, there's other things that are happening there.

• 21:59Speaker 05

  A lot of people have noticed, like, you know, liberal commentators, liberal activists, like, Blue Sky is like clearly the home for that.

• 22:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's the hip Brooklyn bar. It's the hip Brooklyn bar. Yeah. My wife called, my wife called threads, what are you doing over at the Cheesecake Factory? And I said, I like the Cheesecake Factory. I'm sorry to tell you.

• 22:19Speaker 03

  It's perfect.

• 22:19Speaker 06

  Something for everybody.

• 22:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's very good cheesecake.

• 22:22Speaker 05

  Well, yeah, if you're tired of hearing about the election, like, I don't think I can recommend Blue Sky to you. If you don't want to hear about Trump for the next four years, at least right now, I mean, maybe, you know, maybe if you can go to the effort to like create those custom feeds and stuff, threads is.

• 22:38Speaker 05

  More normal, maybe? It's like, they want fashion influencers, they want food influencers. They don't want like journalists talking about Trump.

• 22:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, what about, Neil, are they window shopping? You and I have been through so many rounds of these social media networks. And obviously Meta's dominated almost the entire time since it really got going. Is it just window shopping? Or how, because people have been desperately looking for anything but Elon for a while. And there's been several posts, there's been, like, everyone's trying to find something. And they're desperate because they have such an addiction to the medium, essentially, especially Twitter.

• 23:14Speaker 06

  The heyday of Twitter is this fascinating moment in history. Like, I think hundreds, if not thousands, of PhD people will like write their dissertations on that moment in history when there was a direct line to expertise from a number of fields. And they all just sort of collided. And then there was a massive backlash to expertise being expressed in that way. Right, then Elon was like, what if you all went away? Like, what if I just turned down the knob on whatever you said? And whatever I said appeared to be right. And I think what you see on Blue Sky right now is all of that community is headed to that platform. Right, because on Threads, like, if you're a public health expert, Threads wants nothing to do with you. Right, it's just not interested in you. If you're a tech journalist, you're like, I really want to talk about anything other than federation,

• 23:58Speaker 06

  which Threads, when I post about federated social media, the Threads algorithm is like, yep, that's what we're here for. But almost anything else kind of goes away. There's a lot of that happening, right? If you're an economist, Threads wants nothing to do with you. So you see all the experts are sort of migrating to Blue Sky where they're just rebuilding their communities. Like, infosec Twitter is moving to Blue Sky. And I think that, for whatever it's worth, is creating this like liberal bubble, right? Because the experts of the right are being lauded on X.

• 24:28Speaker 04

  Right, that's their bubble, that's their bubble.

• 24:30Speaker 06

  And it's their bubble. And you see the other group of experts is moving to Blue Sky. Whether or not that can recreate whatever Twitter was, where like, a bunch of other people showed up to hang out with those experts and call them names, I don't know. But there's a whole set of like other groups that are sort of in the middle, right? If I open X, the only thing I'm really looking for right now is a bunch of like NFL beat reporters, because they haven't moved yet. Maybe they're gonna move to Blue Sky and they're gonna build a community there and football fans will go find them there. Like, we just don't know yet. But that conception of a social network where very smart people go and they find their audiences and they distribute directly to them, that's really what Twitter was. What I think of Threads

• 25:12Speaker 06

  as is a meta-platform, a creator platform, where you're there kind of to make money, right? Like, that's what those platforms reward. The big accounts are there to make money by making content directly for Instagram, or directly for Threads, or directly for TikTok or YouTube. And creator platforms just have a very different valence. They create different content, they have different incentives. It is a lot of lifestyle and fashion, and that's pretty much what Meta has always said they want out of Threads. You can do politics here, but really what we want is, you know, someone showing up and being like, "Do you like my dress?" And they're getting it. Like, they're getting the thing they want. They're good at it. And it's always very engagement-baity in that specific way, because that's what the algorithm rewards. But I think it's okay to have a creator platform, and then another

• 25:57Speaker 06

  platform that rewards news and politics and expertise.

• 26:01Kara Swisher?

  Right, that are different.

• 26:02Speaker 06

  And it's basically a bunch of trade publications, right?

• 26:04Kara Swisher?

  Right, right.

• 26:04Speaker 06

  And I think that's fine.

• 26:07Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 26:17Kara Swisher?

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• 27:00Kara Swisher?

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• 27:59Kara Swisher?

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• 29:13Speaker 04

  So Neelai, you talked about this Fediverse that you just talked about. This federated media you're talking about. For those who don't know, explain what it means and talk about the difference between X and so-called decentralized social networks. It's protocols, not platforms necessarily.

• 29:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's the very famous Mike Mastick paper, Protocols Not Platforms, that Jack Dorsey read. And then he started the Blue Sky Project to build a protocol. He hired Jay Graber to do it. And then she very smartly said, "I can't do this inside of Twitter. You have to make me my own company." So there's two competitor decentralized protocols. And yeah, it's like a little bit of VHS and beta. But the idea fundamentally is that you, as a user, should be able to own your content, post wherever you want, and then anyone else should be able to find you, the way that email works. Right? You sign up for Gmail, people on Microsoft Mail can find you, people on Apple Mail can find you. That is not true right now with social networks. You sign up for Twitter, you're on Twitter, there's a wall.

• 30:11Speaker 06

  It's very hard to find that content off of Twitter. It's impossible to engage with that content off of Twitter. Same with Meta, same with TikTok, whatever. The core idea is we should all be able to publish and receive engagement freely, the way that we can do with email.

• 30:26Speaker 04

  And then what's the experience difference? Because most people don't want to make their own butter, Neelai.

• 30:31Speaker 06

  They don't. And the user differences right now are super minimal because none of these platforms have completed the project. Right? So if you truly want to experience federated social media, your answer right now is Mastodon, which has done it. It's like saying, if you really want to experience computers, you have to run Linux.

• 30:48Speaker 04

  Right.

• 30:49Speaker 06

  Most people are not going to do that. So Threads is approaching it very interestingly. They're taking one federated feature and rolling that to the whole user base at once. So Fediverse sharing is on. So now other people on Mastodon can see your thread stuff. Everybody gets that at once, but you can't see what people are liking or replying to you. Then they're going to add likes, and you can see who liked your stuff, but you can't reply to them. So it's one feature at a time at scale, which is a really interesting way to build anything. Blue Sky and the app protocol hasn't really rolled it out at all. Like, there's no other Blue Sky app yet.

• 31:21Speaker 04

  Right.

• 31:22Speaker 06

  Right, like, the promise of federation there, they're sort of rolling out big chunks at a time.

• 31:27Speaker 04

  So it could be different, but it sounds, I mean, exhausting.

• 31:30Speaker 06

  Right, so right now, Blue Sky is a very centralized service. Like, you can have your own data, you can publish your own data, there's things that are federated about it, and people are building that stuff, and it's really interesting. But you're downloading the Blue Sky app from Blue Sky, and for the most part, most people are publishing to their own server.

• 31:45Speaker 04

  Got it, so tastes like chicken, essentially.

• 31:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 31:47Speaker 04

  So, every week, we get a question from an outside expert. This week, the question is from someone who's had his fair share of run-ins on X, former CNN anchor, Don Lemon. He's also in a lawsuit with Elon Musk, which is why he came off of Twitter, because he was nervous about it getting moved to the new venue, he's been suing him in California. Let's listen.

• 32:06Speaker 00

  X, formerly Twitter, has long been dominated by major figures like Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Matt Gaetz, and Tulsi Gabbard, who especially right now garner worldwide media exposure. Despite the reported exodus and concerns over toxicity, can platforms like Blue Sky and Threads compete? Or will they end up like MySpace? Overtaken by X's global reach and its broad appeal to many journalists like yourselves, will users return to X's drama even after leaving on principle?

• 32:39Speaker 04

  Neil, I'll start with you, then Alex, then Mike, very quickly.

• 32:41Speaker 06

  I'm just blown away by the news anchor voice.

• 32:43Speaker 04

  I know, do you like that?

• 32:44Speaker 06

  I can't.

• 32:45Speaker 04

  Don Lemon! I know, because he sent that to me last night.

• 32:47Speaker 06

  I love it.

• 32:47Speaker 04

  He goes, "Very good, Don Lemon!"

• 32:51Speaker 06

  That is a skill. I gotta work harder on that.

• 32:53Speaker 04

  Yeah. You're never gonna make it, so.

• 32:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's not gonna happen. I guess I fundamentally reject the premise of that question, not in a malicious way or a bad way. X and Twitter were tiny, right?

• 33:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:06Speaker 06

  Criticism of the current X management is in no way praise for the previous Twitter management.

• 33:12Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 33:12Speaker 06

  This was a disaster of a company through and through. They never made any money.

• 33:16Speaker 04

  Never.

• 33:17Speaker 06

  They never got over 375 million users, I think at the peak, maybe it was 325, with some amount of bots in it. Like, this was a tiny platform that carried vastly oversized influence, precisely because a bunch of experts and elites chose to use it. Regular people consumed tweets through cable news, or screenshots on TikTok, or something else.

• 33:40Speaker 04

  Or Facebook on Facebook.

• 33:41Speaker 06

  Right. There was just something else happening where the content from that platform migrated to the bigger platforms that were much better run and had much wider reach. And yet, sometimes you created a main character on Twitter and that would break through. But actually, much more rarely than people think. Right? Those people are already famous. So I just think like, if all the experts are posting on Blue Sky, if Flavor Flav, who is like, the lead celebrity evangelist of Blue Sky right now, recruits even more musicians on the Blue Sky, we're just gonna see their posts. I don't think the media ecosystem really cares about the platform at the source. I think they care about those people.

• 34:16Speaker 04

  It's just where they are. Alexa?

• 34:18Speaker 05

  I've been thinking a lot these days about like, fragmentation. And it just feels like, okay, sure, like Twitter was never the biggest social media platform, but I do think it was the primary driver of like, a lot of the media narrative. And I'm just not sure we're gonna see like, any site replace that. It feels like, you know, we're all kind of moving to our more insular, kind of different communities online.

• 34:45Speaker 06

  And the platforms will tell you all the actions in group chats. It's not on the public part of the platforms.

• 34:49Speaker 04

  That's correct, like on Signal and WhatsApp. Mike?

• 34:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, it's funny. I was, so I'm home in Texas for a bit, and I was out with a buddy last night, and I think he uses the time with a New York Times reporter to tell me all the things I'm doing wrong, or how legacy media is wrong, which is very useful.

• 35:05Speaker 06

  That's what the point of being friends with a New York Times reporter is.

• 35:07Speaker 03

  That is exactly it. But he just sort of doubled down on the point. He's like, look, I spend my whole day in Discord and in like, different WhatsApp groups. These are like where my friend groups are like talking and where I'm primarily getting a lot of my news. And I agree with both of you, like Twitter punched above its weight for a long time and was highly influential and all of that. They never really gathered all of the value for themselves as a company for that because it trickled out elsewhere. I think people vote with their feet on where they feel they're getting the most value. And to me, it doesn't exist for Twitter in the same way that it did before. Maybe the folks who are happy with Elon's shifts stick around there and feel like they have a space there.

• 35:49Speaker 03

  But I'm skeptical because of a lot of the user experience just feels less interesting to me now.

• 35:55Speaker 04

  Which is what he talked about when he first bought it. If you don't feel good after an hour on this site, you should leave, which I did, which is interesting.

• 36:02Speaker 06

  But he feels great. He feels, he feels amazing.

• 36:06Speaker 04

  Does he? Does he?

• 36:08Speaker 06

  To whatever extent he can truly feel happy.

• 36:10Speaker 03

  Right.

• 36:11Speaker 06

  Yeah. I think he's manufactured as much of it as he can.

• 36:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, let me quote Wicked. There's a line where Al Capone looks at the prince and says, that's why you're so unhappy. He's, you know, he's dancing through life, but in fact, he's not. And Elon is dancing badly through life. He's a bad dancer. Sorry. That is fact. That is fact.

• 36:28Speaker 03

  I'm shocked.

• 36:30Speaker 06

  Can I say something just in response to your thought, Mike? And I think about this all the time because I, you two are reporters and you're very good reporters. My background is like product reviewer, right? And the history of product reviews is you can hype up the product all you want and then people get it and they experience it. And the truth outs every time. The products work or they don't, they're good or they're bad, and you can just be evaluative of that. And I think, yeah, people are going to go into their bubbles, they're going to go into their discords, they're going to go into the DMs. But at some point, they're going to experience the public side of the platforms as well. And regular people can just evaluate. I open Twitter and I look at this feed and it's just these people screaming that this woman should not go to the bathroom. And this is stupid, right?

• 37:15Speaker 06

  And I, the truth outs like very consistently, especially with tech products. People are like, yeah, I'm over this. Like I can just click a different button on my phone. And I, I'm curious to see how that specifically plays out because.

• 37:29Speaker 06

  This was not like a overwhelming mandate of an election. Like, a lot of people are pissed about the outcome of this election.

• 37:37Speaker 04

  No, it's very close.

• 37:37Speaker 06

  And they might just do something else, right? They might just choose to have different experiences.

• 37:41Speaker 04

  Well, one of the things is my sons use Reddit. My sons use WhatsApp. They use Snapchat. So I think what Alex is saying about fragmentation is absolutely. They do not use those things. So I want to get through that role of politics you just mentioned and misinformation is played. One of the things is the moderation things. Now, Alexi, Neel, and you have also been talking about that. Content moderation is moving away from content moderation. They set up disinformation teams. Those have mostly disappeared. Neel, as you know, you've been following this a long time. What has happened here? Alexa, first, you've been reporting on Twitter X since the last election. Talk about the content moderation. They've just given up, correct? And then Neel, I follow.

• 38:22Speaker 05

  I mean, you know, but let's just start with X says they are, you know, promoting free speech. But yes, like, there is this backlash to when Twitter was backchecking Donald Trump. These platforms kicked Donald Trump, like, off. It seems crazy to think about now, like, you know, how much has changed? And there's an easing up. These platforms did not have a good experience wading into these moderation debates. Basically, like, people on all sides got mad. So, yeah, you know, Elon came in and he said, like, I want to do the bare minimum, basically, to moderate.

• 39:00Speaker 04

  And that's where they, and they all followed. Neel?

• 39:03Speaker 06

  I have a different and probably vastly more cynical view of this. They're all still moderating, right? There's a bunch of stuff they have to do. You have to kick child sexual abuse material off your platforms.

• 39:13Speaker 04

  Right.

• 39:14Speaker 06

  Everyone I know who works in trust and safety, they're still spending a lot of time on this very pernicious, devastating problem. They all have huge problems coming with AI, right? If you show an average user just a feed of AI slop, maybe that's your dream. Like, maybe that's Mark Zuckerberg's dream, is that he can make AI-based advertising and show it to a million people. But the tools aren't there yet. So they're having to moderate an incoming. Firehose of just garbage that they're all getting.

• 39:41Speaker 04

  So it's garbage over things they that are.

• 39:44Speaker 06

  Right, they're they're they're spending a bunch of time still moderating a bunch of the copyright law is the only real law on the internet. Like, if you want somebody taken down off the internet, you say it's a copyright violation and then it comes off the internet.

• 39:56Speaker 04

  That's what happened to the Sandy Hook parents.

• 39:58Speaker 06

  Right, and so there's all these ways, there are all these things they still have to do and they still have to invest in it. And even X still has to invest in a bunch of them. What they're out of is the idea that anyone has to be polite or that anyone that that that they will run a company whose internal values are expressed in the product they show to people. So, you know, Facebook has internal values, right? You can't just like show up to Facebook and just be racist. Like, they will just fire you. That will happen. You can show up on Facebook and be racist. That's weird.

• 40:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:29Speaker 06

  That is like, there are very few companies where your internal values are such an obvious disconnect with the the product that you're making for millions of people. And I think they have just decided that that disconnect is okay. And I I think what we're seeing with some of this federation stuff with the the reason I'm excited about that is because it allows users to choose their own moderate. It creates a market for moderation.

• 40:53Speaker 04

  Meaning they can have a very racist feed or a very this feed.

• 40:56Speaker 06

  If that's what you want.

• 40:57Speaker 04

  They have been kicking out much more. They they don't mind kicking people off at Blue Sky.

• 41:00Speaker 06

  They they don't mind kicking people.

• 41:02Speaker 04

  Like, I think Andrew Tate came on and off.

• 41:04Speaker 06

  Right, because they have this out, right? Where they can say, look, set up your own server.

• 41:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:09Speaker 06

  Go do it. You can interoperate with us. And I think that is an incredible exit ramp for anyone to say, look, the free market will solve this problem because we are interoperable. And so we're going to have our values and the internal values of our company will match the external values of our product.

• 41:23Speaker 04

  Which is the selling point of Blue Sky.

• 41:25Speaker 06

  And then and then if you don't like it, set up another, build your own.

• 41:29Speaker 04

  Get out of our bar, get out of our bar, essentially. So Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, four major social media platforms are owned by Meta. Mark Zuckerberg, Mike, you've reported so long on him, but how he started de-emphasizing political content around the 2020 election, then doubled down this year. Talk about what's going on behind the scenes and what that looked like for users. Mark wrote a letter to Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee in August, about the election and said, my goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or other, or even appear to be playing a role. It's such a pretzel he's doing there. What do you do you think he's sticking that mantra? And how does that impact? Where is he right now, besides singing with? T-Pain.

• 42:08Speaker 03

  T-Pain.

• 42:09Speaker 04

  I cannot discuss this at this point. I kind of like it, but I hate it. So it's really a difficult decision.

• 42:16Speaker 03

  As a 40-year-old dad, I'm like, what if I pay T-Pain to hang out with me?

• 42:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, right, right, okay. Oh, ow.

• 42:23Speaker 03

  I don't think I can afford that. That's pretty good.

• 42:26Speaker 04

  Don't do it. Don't post it, for fuck's sake.

• 42:29Speaker 03

  I know, right? Yeah. I think there, okay, so, yeah, his sort of political evolution personally has been very fascinating. But I think he got really cynical after going through 2016 to 2024. I think there were some company covering efforts to rein in moderation on Facebook to seek out disinfo. That definitely, from a, like, a corporate standpoint, they had to do it, or else they were gonna get regulated into oblivion, and they still did anyway, but they did enough there. I also think, like, there was a point at which Mark was like, yes, I have an obligation to deal with some of this stuff. And if I just go to Washington and, because you know Kara, like, he used to just send Cheryl there all the time.

• 43:13Speaker 03

  Like, she was the face in Washington for a long time. Then he was like, all right, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna appear at seven different Capitol Hill hearings, explain my point of view, regulators will get it, and then everything will be great. Obviously, that never happened. He just became even more of a target from certain figures on the right, like Josh Hawley, sort of rose, like, attacking him specifically. And there was a point where he was like, I'm, why am I still doing this? Why am I engaging in good faith in Washington, spending tens of billions of dollars on moderation or whatever to only get continually beat up? And so I think he was like, yes, I'm gonna have my army of lobbyists still dealing with Washington.

• 43:56Speaker 03

  I have all these people sort of go in and march and do the stuff. I have Nick Clegg, who is now basically our ambassador to the world, you know? So I don't have to deal with this. And then, you know, try to excise or at least reduce as much politics on our platforms as I can, because it's just more of a headache to me than it's worth.

• 44:14Speaker 04

  Although Trump had threatened him with prison.

• 44:17Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 44:17Speaker 04

  He still tends to. Not nearly, like, Elon is sitting right next to him in some of these calls with Google and everybody else, so.

• 44:24Speaker 03

  He's really, they're under threat.

• 44:25Speaker 04

  He's not out, he's not out of the line of fire.

• 44:27Speaker 03

  Also, can I just point out, he only responds to threats from the right wing.

• 44:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:31Speaker 06

  Right?

• 44:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a good point. That's a great point.

• 44:33Speaker 06

  It's not that he made it neutral and the conservatives went away. It's that the conservatives are in power and now they don't give a shit. Right? And that, and there's no counterbalancing force there. And I don't think there should be.

• 44:45Speaker 04

  Right.

• 44:45Speaker 06

  Right? Like, really, what we're talking about is like, what platform will have the users? We're also talking about, like, is there a First Amendment in America? Should the government haul the distributors of speech in front of panels and yell at them about not distributing their tweets? No. And I honestly think one of the mistakes that all of these CEOs made, Sundar, Jack, Mark, when they went, they forgot to talk about the First Amendment. They did not assert their own rights in front of Congress as loudly as they should have. They just apologized. They just wussed out because they want other tax breaks. They want other shit. They want subsidies on Nvidia, whatever they want. Right? But they forgot to say, actually, you know what we are is major distributors of American speech with our own rights.

• 45:25Speaker 04

  Right, that's right.

• 45:25Speaker 06

  And if this conversation is inappropriate, and we're past that, like, we're in a very dangerous place for the First Amendment right now because all of the people in charge of the Trump administration are kind of like, what if you did what we said instead?

• 45:38Speaker 04

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 45:48Kara Swisher?

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• 47:56Speaker 04

  So let's look in the future. We're going to finish up talking about that. We talked about how President Trump has tapped Commissioner Brendan Carr to run the FCC. Trump hailed him as a warrior for free speech, but a lot are concerns that he wants to be a speech police. I would agree with this. He has argued that users should be able to personalize content filters, but it's clear he's mostly concerned with the censorship of conservative voices. He's Elon's best friend, as we noted on Twitter. What impact do you think he will have on content moderation, Alexa, briefly, and then each of you?

• 48:29Speaker 05

  I mean, you know, from what I understand, there's like a lot of questions about what he could actually do in his role, you know, what can that?

• 48:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, he doesn't have the biggest job, right? He doesn't have very many rights, right?

• 48:41Speaker 05

  So what are the actual like regulatory powers? One thing I've been thinking about, though, is a point I wanted to make just in terms of like the influence of X in the Trump administration. I think it's still going to be a really important platform. I don't think it's going to be a platform like we can ignore for the next four years. Maybe if you're an average user, sure, you can like go on Blue Sky and forget about it, but not journalists. It's like the platform, the biggest platform that the president-elect is using, huge influence still.

• 49:10Speaker 04

  And he's sitting right next to him. Go ahead, Neelam Kar.

• 49:14Speaker 06

  Brendan Carr is a wannabe and has been a wannabe for a long time. He's like a vergedator. We've profiled him before. He's just been floating around our ecosystem for a long time.

• 49:23Speaker 04

  He has.

• 49:24Speaker 06

  He wrote the Project 2025 chapter on what the FCC should do. I would just note, most of Project 2025, you read it, you're like, what's the chapter in the Department of Education? It's like, get rid of it. The chapter in the FCC is very long and it's Brendan Carr saying, I should have more power in all of these ways. It's strikingly different than the other chapters in that specific way. And a lot of it is legally tenuous, like it's inconsistent with like Supreme Court decisions from a very conservative Supreme Court. Like the Supreme Court does not want a bunch of government agencies to have a lot of power. And in fact, they just released a ruling in like Loper Bright that got rid of Chevron. Like, they're basically like saying the courts can override the agencies. That is the big Supreme Court ruling. It's undoing the administrative state. At that

• 50:06Speaker 06

  same Federalist Society conference, they did a champagne toast about that ruling that they destroyed the administrative state. Brendan Carr in Project 2025 is like, I will issue a ruling from the FCC reinterpreting Section 230 to get rid of some judicial precedent I don't like, so I can moderate the platforms.

• 50:23Speaker 04

  Right.

• 50:23Speaker 06

  What are you talking about?

• 50:24Speaker 04

  No, he's not going to get it.

• 50:25Speaker 06

  But do you know who hates this idea is Clarence Thomas.

• 50:28Speaker 04

  Right.

• 50:28Speaker 06

  Like, you're going to roll right into your own conservative movement in a way that makes no sense. But what he will get to do along the way is fulminate about taking 230 away, fulminate about who has access. Starlink is a giant ISP for rural America, right? He wants to deploy that more broadly. There's no net neutrality because they're helping to cut away. Now Elon gets to turn the scales of what platforms hit your data caps, what don't, what videos load faster or buffer or high quality. That's a lot of games you can play, even without the formal power, or in Brendan Carr's case, a consistent, logical, intellectual position.

• 51:02Speaker 04

  Okay, Mike, very briefly.

• 51:04Speaker 03

  Sorry.

• 51:05Speaker 06

  I want to make it very clear how I feel about.

• 51:07Speaker 03

  I was gonna say just spare no.

• 51:09Speaker 04

  I will tell you, he's super friendly.

• 51:10Speaker 06

  He is very polite.

• 51:11Speaker 03

  Is he?

• 51:11Speaker 04

  Hey girl, he's a hey girl kind of guy.

• 51:13Speaker 03

  It's a very, I love, I love meeting people who are one person on Twitter and then a very different person in real life.

• 51:19Speaker 04

  Very much so.

• 51:21Speaker 03

  That's funny. You know, I keep thinking back to, do you all remember trending topics gate on Facebook years ago?

• 51:27Speaker 06

  No, God.

• 51:28Speaker 03

  Where all of this just sort of goes back to this moment where there was a, what I think was a faulty story published about like censoring right wing people on Facebook. It sort of got dismantled. People saw it as kind of flawed, but out of that, I think a lot of folks on the right sort of realized the power of using this cudgel to say, we are being silenced on here and have never really stopped doing that. And like, you know, no matter how prominent they are, and to your point earlier, Neil, I, the, they, the, the CEOs of these companies listen, are very attuned to those complaints all the time and tend to react more to them than to folks on the left.

• 52:08Speaker 03

  And so I, you know, who knows if he's gonna have any more power, you know, or get what he's asking for.

• 52:15Speaker 04

  He's definitely gonna make himself a nuisance.

• 52:17Speaker 03

  Right, but I think that's gonna be the bugbear and I'm just, I'm not looking forward to it because you don't really have good faith conversations about a lot, a lot of the time.

• 52:27Speaker 05

  I just briefly wanted to kind of add on my answer to you in terms of influence. I, I think I said like X is the biggest platform the president elect is using. Again, you know, Trump is on TikTok, Trump is on Facebook. Yes, those are bigger, but you know, bigger in terms of like, you know, driving the media narrative. So yeah, same punching above its weight.

• 52:45Speaker 06

  Trump is native to Twitter in truth. He is not native to TikTok.

• 52:49Speaker 03

  He's a born poster on Twitter too. He's, he knows how to post.

• 52:52Speaker 04

  I wrote a whole New York Times column. He said, the world's greatest Twitter troll.

• 52:55Speaker 06

  I think it was Tucker, Tucker Carlson made the campaign documentary that he published. And there's just a scene, I don't recommend watching that, but there's a scene in it where Trump is sitting next to a laptop, a woman using laptop composing a tweet.

• 53:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:08Speaker 03

  And it is, I feel like all of us should just watch that.

• 53:11Speaker 04

  That's incredible.

• 53:12Speaker 03

  This is how the government works now.

• 53:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:14Speaker 03

  It's just a man looking at someone typing and

• 53:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:17Speaker 03

  and saying tweets.

• 53:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:18Speaker 03

  It's wild.

• 53:19Speaker 04

  Well, he's good at it, let's be honest.

• 53:20Speaker 03

  I agree.

• 53:21Speaker 04

  All right, last couple of questions. Um, there's a bottom line. Right now, X is one of the biggest social sites, but also a huge money pits. It's not one of the biggest, actually. The other is bigger. Um, I don't, I, I don't think he cares. He's rich. This is like his toxic yacht that he sails from harbor to harbor and spews venom. The truth is, the group of banks lent him $13 billion and they still have those loans on their books. His friends gave him money. He's lost them all this kind of money. They hope to get it back at SpaceX, et cetera. He's hired a new chief financial officer.

• 53:54Speaker 04

  Alexa, does it matter? Does this, does it matter that they're losing money? And then separately, Mike and Eli, Threads is owned by Meta, has bags of money. It's going to start doing advertising soon. Blue Sky, of course, is a startup and it has to scrounge for cash. And Blue Sky CEO Jay Graber has talked about how the site is billionaire proof. So she's kind of nonchalant about its future. She said the people will take the seat elsewhere if the site doesn't work. Each of you, Alexa, talk about the money at Twitter. Uh, Mike, you at Meta and Eli, you at Blue Sky.

• 54:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, does it matter? I don't think it matters to Elon and his bigger empire, how much money like on the margins X is making or not. Obviously it matters to the people working there. And that's something I hear about a lot in my reporting. But no, Elon is really like, it's, it's Elon's business empire.

• 54:45Speaker 04

  Uh huh. Mark Cuban told me this right when he bought it. He's not buying it for anything else, but influence doesn't matter how much money he loses. Um, and it is continuing to lose money, correct?

• 54:55Speaker 05

  As far as we know, you know, we don't get a lot of detail about their financial these days.

• 54:59Speaker 03

  Linda says it's great.

• 55:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, Linda says it's great. Linda, oh my God, I forgot about her.

• 55:04Speaker 03

  She's so good.

• 55:06Speaker 04

  Aw.

• 55:07Speaker 03

  Her posts are amazing.

• 55:08Speaker 04

  Aw, she's still mad at Kara Swisher. Anyway, too bad, Linda.

• 55:12Speaker 03

  I'm shocked.

• 55:12Speaker 04

  Walked right into that one. I didn't actually create anything. She did it herself. Anyway, um, Mike, what about Meta? They have so much money and they're going to start advertising. They're like, they could be like Netflix all of a sudden.

• 55:22Speaker 03

  They're so, they're rolling in it. They're rewarded by Wall Street. It's funny, it's very funny. They, if they were any other company, they probably would be punished for the amount of capex that they're spending on. Data centers and marks, you know, some would say folly into the metaverse and like trying to sort of

• 55:41Speaker 04

  Everybody would say that.

• 55:42Speaker 03

  I'm trying to be nice. And but they but they just they're rolling in cash and they then Wall Street loves that every time they build a new product and can scale it very rapidly, there's potential upside in sticking ads in there and plugging it into their ad servers that run Instagram, Facebook, and to some degree WhatsApp. Like they already have so much information on your preferences that they don't have to start from scratch on this new thing. So I think that he gets a long leash on, you know, not being punished for the amount of money that they're spending on other things that may never pay off, or at least take very long time to pay off. And, you know, threads for what problems I see in it, I think, could really work in that regard.

• 56:26Speaker 04

  I do, too. They're gonna put advertising in there and it'll be good.

• 56:29Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 56:29Speaker 04

  It'll be good. It's Instagram for text is how I think of it. What about Blue Sky? The financial prospects, Eli?

• 56:36Speaker 06

  So I interviewed Jay on Decoder earlier this year, and I asked her, I make money. This is before the explosion. Maybe she has new ideas now. But a lot of their ideas are really interesting, right? She said, we're gonna sell people algorithms. We're gonna allow people to compose a list and sell lists. Well, there's some amount of like, how should we do paid tweets that everybody has in the back of their mind? Like, there should be a native subscription platform. So I think their their idea is to sell user experience and then to build an ecosystem of basically like B two B SaaS products where other people want to start Blue Sky servers. We'll see. We'll see how it goes. But they've got a long way to go. I would say Meta is missing a huge opportunity threads because getting away from live and reverse cron means they can't go attack the market that Twitter had won,

• 57:18Speaker 06

  which is everyone's tweeting at the Grammys, everyone's tweeting about football, Ford just put your logo here. Right now, Twitter just X just launched an NFL hub sponsored by Ford, because that's still where people go talk about sports. And Meta is just missing that opportunity, which seems bizarre to me. Like, that's the thing that people want the most is to talk about things that are happening in real time, and brands want to be near it.

• 57:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, they can snatch that. From

• 57:44Speaker 06

  Right, and they should take it tomorrow because they can also do all of the rest of the targeting across their network. And they they've just missed it. And I think once they wake up and realize, oh, this is what people actually want. The you'll and also they're feeling to whatever extent competitive pressure from Blue Sky. I think they have an opportunity to make a different kind of money. Meta doesn't make a lot of brand money. They make a lot of like small business, direct money. Yes. This is an opportunity to make brand money, and I think they will wake up to it very quickly.

• 58:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, I agree. They'll figure it out. So last question, Blue Sky and Threads aren't the only sites that are seeing post-election bumps. The CEO of Spill, a social media site focused on the black community, says it's a 10x week over week signup. It's small, obviously. Truth Social has only about 4 million monthly visits and like 60% men, angry, angry men. But it's still around. So is that the the future of these specialized insular bubbles, little echo chambers? And then you worry about other people coming into your echo chamber. You know, life is like that, like real life is like that. Little bars you like, little places, neighborhoods. And we haven't talked about TikTok, but are we in a new age? And what does that mean for people?

• 58:51Speaker 04

  Who are trying to get a larger town square, even though these are not town squares? Each of you. First, let's start with Alexa and then Mike and we'll finish up with Neelai.

• 59:01Speaker 05

  I think we're entering a new era of fragmentation, and I honestly don't know what it means. So I'm curious to hear what you guys think, but I just. I think like a lot of the conversation has been like what platform is going to win Blue Sky Threads X? And I think the answer is more like, you know, we're just like people are finding where they want to be.

• 59:21Speaker 04

  Where they want to be. All right, Mike?

• 59:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's right. I think, Cara, when you were saying earlier about your kids using Reddit a lot. Like Reddit kind of for me is a model of this just because of how strong and tight knit. Very specific communities are on there and each one kind of develops their own.

• 59:41Speaker 04

  Stock is going well right now.

• 59:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, they I'm shocked, honestly, that they did this well, just because of how much of a mess that company was in its earlier for most of its life. But like Reddit and Twitter kind of function or historic Twitter kind of function in similar ways in that like you could go real deep on one niche and find your sort of.

• 59:58Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 59:58Speaker 03

  Community there. And like, I think people.

• 1:00:03Speaker 03

  Just kind of your experience with Twitter, Kara. It's like, they don't like to be screamed at or told that they're wrong all the time. And like, even if intellectually you can, you want to say, like, the marketplace of ideas is good, I should be able to talk to people and have differences. On some level, you're like, well, I still, at the end of the day, want to talk to people who kind of agree with me, right? And be around those folks.

• 1:00:22Speaker 04

  Or like what I like. It's more interests, right? That's why Reddit is so appealing, I think.

• 1:00:26Speaker 03

  Totally. So I agree. I think fragmentation is probably going to go even further from here.

• 1:00:31Speaker 04

  You like to finish up?

• 1:00:33Speaker 06

  I think it's, it's interesting to think about is fragmentation, right? We've all been poisoned by the idea that there should be global-scale platforms where everything happens. That is not true. That's like, not how the media worked until five years ago. And so I, I think this is actually just a sort of natural rebalancing. And really, and I don't think it's filter bubbles, I think it's communities. Like, people want their communities, and communities are pretty disparate, right? Like, the left is not a monolith, like, very clearly. It's always yelling at each other. That's probably why it can't wield powers effectively as the right, which has epistemic closure, and they all just say the same thing all the fucking time.

• 1:01:05Speaker 04

  They're fighting underneath, you'll see.

• 1:01:07Speaker 06

  It's, that's coming, right? He already, he already looks kind of pissed at Elon, so we'll see how it goes.

• 1:01:13Speaker 03

  Oh, I can't wait.

• 1:01:14Speaker 04

  Can't wait.

• 1:01:15Speaker 06

  But there's, there's just an element where I think, you used to live in a pretty local media environment. You had local television, local papers, you would have some exposure to national issues. For the past however long, it's just like, all national all the time. Everyone, everyone in the world's going to talk about one thing, because the algorithms are like, this is the most engaging thing today. There's a llama on the loose, you must pay attention to this llama. That's weird. Like, I, I think it's fundamentally weird. And I think an internet that is more local, where people go to more different kinds of things and have more different kinds of experiences, fundamentally healthier for everyone.

• 1:01:48Speaker 04

  Yep. Nature is healing.

• 1:01:50Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:01:51Speaker 04

  Nature is.

• 1:01:52Speaker 06

  In the weirdest possible way.

• 1:01:53Speaker 04

  In the weirdest possible way. Anyway, thank you all, all of us. We'll be continuing to follow this. It's a business story, it's a social story, it's a sort of sixth society story and everything else, and it's a reflection of ourselves. And I really appreciate your thoughtfulness. Thank you.

• 1:02:08Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:02:09Speaker 04

  Thanks.

• 1:02:10Speaker 03

  Reunited.

• 1:02:11Speaker 04

  Reunited. And it feels so good.

• 1:02:13Speaker 03

  It feels so good.

• 1:02:16Speaker 04

  Got any plans for Tuesday, December 3? I hope you'll join me at a special live recording of this very podcast, On with Kara Swisher, presented by Elf Cosmetics. To be CEO Anjali Sood and I will be tackling gender disparity in the boardroom and exploring how companies with women in the C-suite have better business outcomes. I'm really looking forward to this discussion on equality and so much more, including what's happening in the streaming space, and I don't want you to miss it. For tickets, visit voxmediaevents.com/elf. That's voxmediaevents.com/elf. I hope to see you there.

• 1:02:52Speaker 04

  On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castor-Russell, Kateri Yokum, Jolie Myers, Megan Burney, and Kalen Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio. Special thanks to Kate Ferby. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Aruda, and our theme music is by Track academics. If you're already following the show, you can also follow us on Instagram and TikTok. I'm hanging out on Threads and Blue Sky. It's a lot, but don't go over to X at all. Please don't. If not, there's a llama on the loose. Go catch it. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.

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